03 February 2011

The Jews of Venezuela

Much has been written on this blog about the history of the Jews throughout the Caribbean and South America. Yet another country seems to have been influenced by these Jews.

The earliest Jews to arrive in Venezuela, did so in the middle of the 1600's when groups of marranos lived in the cities of Caracas and Maracaibo. Many of these Jews however continued lived their Jewish lives in private. This began to change however in the early 1800's when

sephardic Jews from the Dutch colony of Curacao began to migrate into the city of Santa Ana de Coro.The Jewish cemetery of Coro was established by these same Jews from Curacao in 1824 and is now the oldest Jewish Cemetery in continuous service in the Americas.Later, some families arriving fromSt. Thomas, settled in other cities such as Barcelona. The family of Jacob and Benvenida Jesserun Lindo had 8 of their 9 children born there from 1847 to 1866. Another family, Abraham and Rebecca Henriques Moron lived in Barcelona from at least 1843 till 1855 when their first 8 children were born.

The Baiz family was a prominent family from Venezuela who migrated to New Jersey and established themselves in the Jewish community there. Their history was told in an earlier blog entry. The Jewish population of Venezuela slowly rose through the beginning of the 1900's till there were about 6000 Jews living their in 1950. After World War II and following the 6 Day War in 1967 the population grew dramatically. This later group of immigrants included a large number of Sephardic Jews from Morocco. With this immigration the Jewish population peaked at just under 50,000 people, mostly in Caracas.

Another indication of the impact the Jews of Venezuela have had worldwide is that the records of them can be found in The Knowles Collection-Jews of Caribbean database as well as the Jews of the Americas Database.

Contact Me

Linked in

Twitter

Facebook Badge

Why the Knowles Collection?

From an early age I have been trying to find as much information as I could about my gggrandfather, Morris DavidRosenbaum, a Polish Jew. In my search and through my work as a Reference Consultant in the British Research unit at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, I have compiled records of The Jewish people. This collection, linking Jewish families, is available free to all. Hopefully, people will come together to share the stories of their own families.

Size of the databases (28 Jan 2015)

Jews of British Isles 208,349Jews of Europe380,637Jews of North America489,400Jews of South America and Caribbean21,351Jews of Africa & Orient37,618Jews of South Pacific21,518

Total 1,158,873

Growth and Change

In the 7 years since the Knowles Collection was first published, the numbers have climbed from just over 7,500 to over 1,000,000as of April of 2014. So many of our ancestors left their native lands for new homes. Because of that movement the collection will now be in 6 different databases. All of them will be under the Knowles Collection umbrella. They are Jewsof The British Isles; Jews of the North America; Jews of Europe; Jews of South America and the Caribbean; and Jews of Africa and the Orient and the newest one, Jews of the Southern Pacific.. This is a great indication of how universal our families are, and of how much still needs to be done.